Currently, antidepressants are the dominative treatment for depression, but they have limitations in efficacy and may even produce troublesome side effects. Electroacupuncture (EA) has been reported to have therapeutic benefits in the treatment of depressive disorders. The present study was conducted to determine whether EA could enhance the antidepressant efficacy of a low dose of citalopram (an SSRI antidepressant) in the chronic unpredictable stress-induced depression model rats. Here, we show that a combined treatment with 2 Hz EA and 5 mg/kg citalopram for three weeks induces a significant improvement in depressive-like symptoms as detected by sucrose preference test, open field test, and forced swimming test, whereas these effects were not observed with either of the treatments alone. Further investigations revealed that 2 Hz EA plus 5 mg/kg citalopram produced a remarkably increased expression of BDNF and its receptor TrkB in the hippocampus compared with those measured in the vehicle group. Our findings suggest that EA combined with a low dose of citalopram could produce greater therapeutic effects, thereby, predictive of a reduction in drug side effects.

Medical education in mainland China has undergone massive expansion and reforms in the past decades. A nation-wide survey of the five-year clinical medicine programs aimed to examine the course hours, pedagogies, learning resources and teaching staff of anatomy both at present and over the past three decades (The directors or senior teachers from 90 out of the 130 five-year clinical medicine programs were invited to fill out a factual questionnaire by email. Ultimately, sixty-five completed questionnaires were received from 65 different schools. It was found that the total number of gross anatomy course hours has decreased by 11% in the past 30 years and that systematic and regional anatomy have been increasingly taught separately among the surveyed medical schools. Problem-based learning has been adopted in thirty-five (54%) of the surveyed schools, and team-based learning is used in ten (15%) of the surveyed schools. The surveyed schools reported receiving more donated cadavers in recent years, with the average number increasing from 20.67 ± . However, this has not resulted in a decrease in the number of students who needed to share one cadaver (11.85 ± 5.03 in 1990-1999 to 14.22 ± 5.0 in 2010-2018). A decreasing trend regarding the teacher-student ratio (1:25

This review suggest that disease-oriented studies using the approach of multi-indexed high-throughput technologies and systems biology analyses will be a preferred strategy for future acupuncture/moxibustion research.

During the spring semester of 2020, medical school anatomists in China were forced by the COVID-19 pandemic to transition from face-to-face educators or part-time online educators to full-time online educators. This nationwide survey was conducted to assess online anatomy education during the pandemic for medical students from nonclinical medicine and clinical medicine majors at medical schools in China via WeChat. The total of 356 responders included 293 responders from clinical medicine and 63 respondents from nonclinical medicine majors (i.e., 21 from preventive medicine, 13 from stomatology, and 29 from traditional Chinese medicine). The survey results showed that several aspects of online anatomy education were quite similar in clinical and nonclinical majors' classes, including theoretical and practical sessions, active learning, assessments and evaluations. However, there were statistically significant differences in class size, implementation of active learning activities prior to the pandemic, and the evaluation of the effectiveness of online learning during the pandemic, between clinical and nonclinical medicine majors. These results indicated that, compared with teachers of anatomy courses in clinical medicine, teachers of nonclinical medicine majors using online learning in medical schools in China had relatively poor preparation for online learning in response to the unforeseen pandemic.

Previous studies have identified the beneficial effects of electroacupuncture (EA) on motor behaviors in Parkinson's disease (PD). However, the role and potential mechanisms of EA in PD-associated depression remain unclear. In the present study, a rat model of PD with unilateral 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA) lesions in the medial forebrain bundle was treated using EA for 4 weeks. We found that 100 Hz EA improved several motor phenotypes. In addition, tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) immunohistochemical analysis showed that EA had a minimal impact on the TH-positive profiles of the ipsilateral ventral tegmental area. Compared with the 6-OHDA group, long-term EA stimulation significantly increased sucrose solution consumption and decreased immobility time in the forced swim test. EA treatment did not alter dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin levels in the striatum and hippocampus. Noticeably, EA treatment reversed the 6-OHDA-induced abnormal expression of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and tropomyosin-related kinase B (TrkB) in the midbrain and hippocampus. These results demonstrate that EA at 100-Hz possesses the ability to improve depressive-like symptoms in PD rats, which is, at least in part, due to the distinct effect of EA on the mesostriatal and mesocorticolimbic dopaminergic pathways. Moreover, BDNF seems to participate in the effect of EA in PD.